Dan Kennedy's blog on media and politics • published by the Boston Phoenix from 2002 to 2005

Saturday, November 06, 2004

A LETTER FROM LONDON. At
least I think that's where he was when he wrote this.
Michael
Goldfarb, the host of
WBUR
Radio's documentary series,
Inside
Out, writes to Media
Log. I'm leaving nothing out - the ellipses are his.

You had a moment in
your
Phoenix column
this week where you realized you were being intolerant ... Don't
ever worry about it when it comes to the religious right.
Intolerance is their weapon. They broke the boundary between the
civic space and the religious space in our society a long time
ago. Remember in my documentary A
Southern State of Mind: Inside
Out, Jim Cobb
reminds us of the Scopes trial. We hear JFK delivering his speech
to the Houston Methodist Ministers conference in 1960 ... This
whole movement can be traced back to the break up of the New Deal
coalition over Civil Rights. This ain't a new thing.

The pushback will inevitably
lead to harsh words. But they were the ones who started it. First
by inventing a religion for us: secular humanism. They have
been fighting that non-existent faith and condemning us gleefully
to hell for decades. Who are these peckerwoods to condemn
anyone? Fight them back.

In the center and on the left
the time has come to revive the magnificent thunderings of the
Abolitionists ... If we seek to understand these Red state
denizens ... it should be pragmatic intelligence gathering. Know
your enemy so you can destroy his arguments.

"Land don't vote" is a phrase
I've been using since the Sage Brush rebellion sent Alan Simpson
to the Senate and later to Harvard where he deployed his charm in
the Institute of Politics to great effect ... perhaps next week
the Phoenix can do a Red/blue state map where population
determines the size of the state in the map. [Here's
one.] Puny
Nebraska and Wyoming dwarfed by Cal and Illinois and Minnesota
would be a more accurate reflection.

The rage and anger cannot go
away, there can be no fear. The existential moment tells us this
is what the country is. Kerry ran as good a race as was possible
for him and he was the best candidate out there.

Now for the changes:
Al
From: go home. Harvard
professors, stop spending your ridiculous salaries on expensive
wine and dinner parties where you can sit around with people you
already agree with. Stop biding your time in the groves of Academe
waiting for a recall to power in the next Democratic
administration and start providing intellectual leadership right
now. Eric
Alterman, stop telling
us what CD is in your changer and do a little more shoe leather
reporting for your opinions.

The left: pick better battles.
In the thirty years since Title IX crowned the civil rights era
the left has only succeeded in making it impolitic for the right
to use hate words like nigger, fag and kike in public. You have
neutralized their language, not their hate. That is no victory,
that is the scaredy-cats way of avoiding the real
fight.

Hollywood, you're so goddam
liberal, right? Because you give all that money to the Democrats,
money earned from making idiot, brain-dead, bang, crash
wallop CGI nonsense. Stop polluting the cultural atmosphere and
get back to stories with real people struggling in our modern
society. The time is right for a revival of films à la John
Ford in his social realist phase: Grapes of Wrath, They
Were Expendable. Film Noir isn't an exercise in style: it is
low-budget story-telling about ordinary folks trapped by
uncontrollable, unaccountable powers. Sound familiar? Flood the
multiplexes with those films. That is a more valuable contribution
to political change than the six-figure check to MoveOn.org.

Everyone, read the bible ... and
some history of how the big book was actually written. Get ready
for theological argument. Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin ... We have
been weighed in the balance and found wanting ... but by the
forces of history, not by the Lord.

NEW AT DANKENNEDY.NET.
Under "Writings," I've posted the text of a lecture
I gave at Northeastern University last Wednesday on "The Media, the
Internet, and the 2004 Presidential Campaign." It's in PDF
format.

FEAR ITSELF. What is
this
crap (PDF file) doing on
page A14 of today's New York Times?

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

DK,Re Fear itself:As usual, you are shooting the messenger. Only liberal idealogues continue to apply the same inputs to a systemic problem, (other than more money), expecting a different output. Unfortunately, there ARE some dopes out there who need such explicit common sense advice, (driven on I-93 lately?) Going back to 9-10-01 would be nice, let us know when "Mr. Peabody and the Wayback Machine" answer your calls. I suspect right-wingers had nowhere as frustrating an experience during Clinton as you seem to be having under Bush43. Like me, you only get to vote once. That means that if you truly want to preach to someone other than The Converted, you are going to have to learn than "whining is not good PR". Just because there are right-wing nut jobs out there doesn't mean that "fighting fire with fire" will work. If ideas have validity, they will succeed with people, it's that simple. On a more practical basis, do you really want to re-live the "Groundhog Day" experience of the last week 208 times?

Re NU speech:If objectivity requires a "cult" we are in worse shape than I thought. Your words were well-chosen for the audience, (i.e. under 25 yrs.old). Older folks would have recognized a certain McCarthy-like tone to criticism of Karl Rove and others or the equivalence of Kerry's and Edwards's "lifetime" voting records. Anecdotal evidence being what it is, one could postulate that we have been visited by aliens, if that were one's agenda. Put me down as a slave to "the cult of objectivity". I guess I'm just not smart enough to form opinions on anything but facts.

About Media Log Archives

The Boston Phoenix's Media Log was launched in 2002 by the paper's then-media columnist, Dan Kennedy, who continued it until he left the paper in 2005. The Phoenix's current media columnist, Adam Reilly, is now the author of Media Log, which has since been renamed Don't Quote Me. Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, blogs at Media Nation.